


Ladder Song

by elena_stidham



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Based on a Lorde Song, Domestic, Domestic Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Heavy Angst, Inspired by Fanart, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, M/M, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Song Lyrics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 10:15:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18776230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elena_stidham/pseuds/elena_stidham
Summary: "No one knows where the ladder goes."--Lorde





	Ladder Song

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS FOR: Heavy PTSD, language, semi-vivid scenes of sex and abuse and mentions of death
> 
> SONGS USED TO GET IN THE MOOD: My Recovery playlist,,,which I have just discovered is now 1/3 Lorde lmao I’m sorry I love her 
> 
> https://open.spotify.com/user/twijill/playlist/08UcNbQJ83tKPdZnp57XY6?si=tqkcER2pTyuYwxtcJn-kpA
> 
> Thank you, Spotify. Like oh my god. They gave me this Lorde playlist, and in it was the “Ladder Song,” which, I had NEVER heard before??? Me, a massive Lorde stan??? But when I heard it, I was blown away. I started playing that on repeat, then I went to walk around my town. I live in Muncie, Indiana if that says anything. It’s basically peak suburbia. I was walking around at dusk, and then I stopped by impulsively to get some frozen yoghurt, and then I sat outside to eat it. The song restarted, just as I began to eat, and ambulance sirens started driving by me as the song began. I watched it go into the dying light, and then I was suddenly hit with this fic. 
> 
> It’s basically just like Swinging Party, if you read that. It’s a collection of scenes for Ash’s recovery progress in Japan. I literally cannot explain how much I love writing recovery fics, so I’m just…gonna keep writing them. I hope you don’t get bored!
> 
> And yes, some scenes are inspired by artwork and yes they are once again by fiveflats/nakimooshi.
> 
> https://twitter.com/nakimooshi/status/1110826428113678336
> 
> https://twitter.com/nakimooshi/status/1111234713610383360
> 
> https://twitter.com/nakimooshi/status/1110275720410877952
> 
> https://twitter.com/nakimooshi/status/1108456047679664128
> 
> The translations for the French shown in order are: my love, my little kitten, and I love you. 
> 
> Anyways I’m rambling. My twitter and tumblr is elenastidham. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you enjoy!
> 
> -Elena

_No one knows where the ladder goes._

 

They’re supposed to be quiet.

It’s in the aftermath of heavy breathing, of sweat and heart bleeding. It’s a moment where the room holds this specific sting of grey, where the lights dim in eyes and the exhaustion kicks in. Ash isn’t gifted with exhaustion like Eiji is. Ash isn’t greeted with the new age of freedom after every heartbeat of sex. He’s stabbed in the gut with pain. Sickness. It’s like he wants to curl up and die – but he doesn’t even have the guts to do that.

Ash does not hold in silence very well, needless to say.

Eiji hears his sobs, the content smile on his face fading as his eyes open, wide with worry. He leans over and notices, now, that these tears are in fact real. It takes a moment for things to settle in.

“…Ash?” Eiji calls softly.

He’s supposed to be quiet. He’s supposed to be getting better.

 

_You’re gonna lose what you love the most._

 

It’s amazing, the stories that hands can tell when they shake. It could hold a bubble of joy. It could hold a bundle of nerves. For Ash, it holds every reminder of who died to these hands before. He was just a kid. He was just a fucking _child._

Eiji has never felt the temperament of these hands – the ones that murder. Eiji has felt the hands that shook in fear. Eiji has felt the hands that reacted in a flashback. Eiji has felt these hands pressed against ceramic, week and dying, for whatever food warmed the lifeless eyes. Eiji should have never felt these hands before.

Ash Lynx is a monster through and through, his heart hollow with agony as the rest of his body screams the very devil he became. Yet with Eiji, he can’t help but crave a touch so tender. He can’t help but love and want to feel that same kind of love in return. He has felt this love before, but now that he lives, knowing what this love feels like, he will never understand what he did to deserve this love in the first place. He genuinely does not understand at all – he’s not sure if he will ever understand.

He wants to touch Eiji. He wants to hold him so bad – but he won’t.

He won’t touch him. He won’t touch him because he is stone and Eiji’s made out of glass. He won’t touch him because these are the hands of a killer. He won’t touch him because if he’d hurt him, he wouldn’t know what to do. He wouldn’t know how to take it. It might just kill him. It might just strike him down through earth.

Eiji pretends not to notice this. He pretends that he doesn’t realise Ash holding his distance when it comes to physical contact. Eiji pretends that it doesn’t break his heart.

He thinks it has something to do with the night before – where the boy had just sobbed for hours upon hours after reaching a climax. He thinks that he’s still sensitive to touch, and he understands, but a part of him wishes that it would at least be talked about, or mentioned, or that Aslan wouldn’t look at him in this broken way.

It kills him. It absolutely kills him.

“I’m sorry,” Eiji says finally. “About last night.”

“It’s not your fault, you shouldn’t be sorry,” Ash immediately defends him. Of course he does. He never lets Eiji take the blame when it happens – it’s not like Eiji caused his trauma surrounding sex, after all. A part of Eiji wishes that things were a little different. That things were a little better back at Cape Cod. “I’m already past it.”

“Are you?” Eiji tries to keep the tone as gentle as possible, knowing it would sound snarky if done wrong. “You seem off.”

“Do I?”

“You’re avoiding me like I’ve got some kind of disease,” Eiji chuckles lightly. No big deal, right? Perhaps Ash didn’t even know he was doing this. That makes sense – it happens sometimes. Doesn’t it?

Ash purses his lips and swallows hard. “Oh.”

Oh. He knows.

“So you _are_ still upset about it,” Eiji comments. “That’s alright. Do you want to talk about it?”

“I promise you, that’s not why I’ve been keeping my distance,” Ash says softly.

Eiji raises an eyebrow. “Isn’t it?”

Ash shakes his head. Keep it together. Keep it _together._

Eiji has to think on this for a moment. What on earth would have caused this, then? Normally Ash is all over him like a cat, almost smothering in affection since he was never really allowed to carry that kind of life with him back in New York. “What’re you thinking, love?” He asks finally. Love. Love. _Love._

The tender tone in Eiji’s voice is enough to punch Ash right in the chest, swallowing his heart and trying to carve into his soul.

“I want to touch you,” he says, finally. He furs his eyebrows. “I don’t want to.”

Eiji’s eyebrows mirror. “Aslan,” he begins. There it is. The real name again. It’s the name that always shatters the glass beneath him and allows him to let everything go. It’s the name that reminds him of where he is, and where he stands in this vulnerability. He’s allowed to be vulnerable with Eiji. He’s allowed to be safe.

Eiji takes a few steps forward, and Aslan does not step back. His cheeks are wet, and he doesn’t even know how they got there. But he does remember the warmth Eiji’s hand brings once the tears are carefully brushed away. The fingers glide across his face and through his hair, tucking the locks behind a pink ear, and all he can do is smile.

“You can touch me. It’s okay,” Eiji reassures.

Ash swallows hard again, shaking his head after a moment of hesitation. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Eiji holds his smile there, now realising the root of this evil haunting his little mind. It has nothing to do with anybody. It just has everything to do with this quiet life, and how noise tends to clash.

So Eiji just takes his hand himself, holding it carefully in both of his, keeping the cold fingers curled and pressed against a palm that’s only warm.

“I want to touch your hand,” Eiji comments simply. “It seems like a fine hand to me.”

Ash still holds a restraint against himself, but he also remembers that he’s home. He remembers where they are. He remembers that even if the stone is cast, he is not met with glass – he is met with a brick wall. It’s a stone that just bounces off onto the pavement, reminding Aslan that he is not a monster. That he does not have to take any more lives today.

 

_You’re not alone in anything. You’re not unique in dying._

 

It’s not often the smell of something would make Ash gag. It’s even less often that the smell would induce panic either. It practically never happens, however, when a smell would spark them both – at the exact same time.

It’s a particular cologne. Musky. Woodsy. It’s like he’s being smothered in moss. There’s something else in the scent, and Ash can never quite place his finger on it – but it’s distinct enough to send adrenaline through his body at the speed of sound the moment he smells it from even a distance.

Eiji’s learned what Dino’s cologne smelled like, and not from first-hand experience. He in fact, doesn’t remember too much about the times he’d be in close proximity to that monster. He was too focused on one thing. Everything else is blurry. But the cologne he’s learned to be able to pick out, so much so that when he caught a similar whiff of it at a candle store in Tokyo, his eyes immediately scanned through the entire department for Ash.

There he was. Shaking.

Eiji was able to pull him out of there in time for him to make it to the nearest bathroom and proceed to vomit, the tears in his eyes blurring his vision as he started to choke between panicked breaths and dry heaving.

“Aslan, please,” Eiji kept his hand pressed gently onto his back, rubbing a soft pattern into his shoulder. “You need to breathe.”

He couldn’t.

It seemed that nothing was grounding him down to reality, the real name nor any other technique was bringing him back from the depths of panic. The breathing didn’t stop shaking. The heartbeats didn’t stop scattering. The scent seemed permanently stuck into his nostrils, wrapping him up in that smell – in those sheets. In those arms. _In that room._

It’s a blessing and a curse that scent is the strongest sense humans can possess. On one hand, it can trigger deeply rooted memories of childhood, reminding someone of the best memories they’ve ever had, sugar coated with joy and screeching laughter and tangled with nostalgia. On the other hand. There’s this.

There’s the darkest, most horrific moments a life could muster. It’s the very things people try so hard to forget – but with just one breath of the scent the memories are shot back into their brain. The memories hold someone by a thread, dangling them inches away from a death they’d bring upon themselves, showing them once again: you’ve been here. You were there in that room. You were suffocated under those clothes. This scent is marked on you. This scent is forever going to haunt you.

And it’s dangling by this thread where Ash remains. He’s smothering. He’s suffocating. He’s sobbing. He’s _dying_.

“Eiji,” Ash manages to squeak, his body wrecked by sobs. “Eiji. _Please._ ”

Eiji pulls his hand off of Ash’s back, wondering if it’s the physical touch that’s pushing him over the edge, now, but Ash shakes his head at that. Eiji resumes. “I keep seeing the room. I feel him there, Eiji – get him _off._ ”

He doesn’t know how.

Eiji brings his hand up to push his own hair out of his face, trying to wipe at the sweat on his forehead, before he gets a whiff of the roll-on perfume oil he had tested on his wrist earlier. It’s sweet. Faintly fruity, but a lot more floral. There’s a hint of vanilla from the tester before, too, and that’s when something clicks.

He pushes his wrist towards Ash’s nose, immediately commanding him now to smell it. He doesn’t know the exact train of thought that pushed his arm forward, but he’s so glad that Ash managed to put two and two together and listened. With just one breath of it, he’s reeling backwards into reality. The gravity of the world is weighing down on him once again and he’s plummeting to the world, but he’s out of that room.

He’s in a sea of gold. He’s in a wheat field. He sees Eiji standing in the evening sun.

He remembered that night. He remembered asking himself if this was what heaven looked like. It was close. Heaven took on four walls and a roof in Izumo.

He doesn’t even realise he’s breathing again until Eiji just sighs in relief, keeping his wrist held up by the boy’s face. Ash holds onto Eiji’s arm, breathing in the smells there, and finally seeing his surroundings of where he is. He’s in a bathroom in the mall. In Tokyo. Japan. He’s in Japan. The room he was just in had burned to the ground a long time ago.

Ash suddenly feels the exhaustion from the panic-induced adrenaline kick in through his system, and it’s then when he lets his body fall limp and press against Eiji’s chest. These arms that wrap around him do not pin him down. They do not begin to twist and rip away clothes. They are just there, holding him tight. They are just there. Everything is alright.

“I’m sorry,” Ash manages to speak, finally. Eiji doesn’t comment, he just shakes his head. Both of them will remember this.

It’s a few weeks later when Ash decides to walk up to Eiji with the question.

“Can you buy that candle?”

At first, Eiji doesn’t remember what he meant. “What candle?”

“The candle at the mall. The one with Dino’s scent.” Ash notices the look of worry on Eiji’s face, the way his eyes wander onward in a way to figure out the best way to tell him _absolutely fucking not—_

“Hear me out,” Ash cuts him off. “Do you remember what we did that got me over the sound of camera clicking?”

Eiji nods. He remembers. “You replaced the sound with pictures taken by me.”

Ash nods. “We replaced it.” He swallows hard. “We’re replacing all of it. I want to replace this, too.”

Eiji knows where he’s coming from and what he’s wanting to do. Honestly, he does. But he hasn’t seen something spark such an intense panic and sickness without actual sex itself. He’s worried of what will happen, of what will go wrong. But he remembers how they’re still working through sex, and how he’s getting better, how he’s moving on past it.

Eiji wants to refuse it, already knowing the pain Ash is going to be in just by a smell of it, but he knows once Ash has his mind set on something, that’s all that remains. He takes a deep breath, then he just nods very carefully. “How do you want it replaced?”

“With you. With…with anything you want to do,” he pauses, then he nods on it. He remembers something else. “Have other candles, too. In case it’s too much.”

“Okay.”

When Eiji comes home with a small paper bag of candles, Ash is already nervous. He knows what’s coming. He knows what – _who_ – he’s going to see. He sees the various candles Eiji places on the little breakfast bar, tossing the bag back onto the table. There’s vanilla. Coffee. Cinnamon. Citrus. It’s all the sweetest of scents, something that will bring him to home, something that will ground him right beside Eiji, remembering that they’re baking cakes.

Then there’s one candle. The label is plaid, katakana etched artfully across the side. _Mahogany and Teakwood_.

Ash takes a long, deep breath, reaching forward and grabbing the candle. He glances at Eiji, sharing a look with those worried dark eyes, but they both knew they were ready. It was time to begin.

Ash uncapped the candle, leaning in and taking in a long inhale, holding his breath and immediately sealing the cap once again when the memories instantly shot into his brain. His stomach lurched. He’s going to die.  

He feels his soul leaping, desperately clinging onto any surface away from home to get him out of that room. Yet his soul was stuck to this ground, to this body, to these chains of mortal coil that would never allow him to leave. He feels his throat burn and his eyes already overheat with tears that suddenly are scalding.

He coughs twice. He’s feeling and reacting in every way he was never allowed to while he was pinned down to that mattress. Ash’s chest hurts with each breath, and he hears a voice in his ears. It’s a voice that sends him onward, a voice that tortures him even within the safety of his own home.

 _“_ _Mon amour_ _.”_

Ash forgot how much he fucking hated that language. He almost wants to ask Eiji to learn it, so that way when he hears these words now, they’re not going to remind him of anything or anyone but Eiji. But he does not hear Eiji. He does not smell him either.

He’s gone.

_“Mon petit chaton.”_

A scream rips past his throat now, his eyes shut tight as he struggles to breathe through the cologne like it’s made of smoke and flames. He hears another voice now, one that spoke in a language he memorised. A language he knows how to use. A language he loves.

“ _Anata,_ ” it said carefully. Anata. He learned this one last week. _Darling_. The voice continued, his brain starting to focus and concentrate. It gets him out of that room. “ _I’m right here._ ”

Eiji has learned to be irrevocably calm in these moments of anguish. He knows if he tries to touch him, tries to comfort him, tries to speak in any other tone, the panic would only worsen. He would only fall into a trap. He’s like a seasoned war veteran, with each attack facing against him like a new battlefield.

Except there’s nobody to kill. There’s just memories on the other side. No matter how many times he fires the smoking gun the bullets don’t pierce through anything other than empty hearts that had already done the deed of taking innocent life away. Dino Golzine was a monster. He’s a dead monster. Yet despite this very fact that doesn’t change the reactions from Ash a simple two feet away.

He noticed that Japanese tends to help him. It’s something only exclusively used with Eiji. While his real name can most of the time ground him with a deep sense of nostalgia, he’s sort of figured out that maybe a name connected to his childhood isn’t a good thing to use while he’s screaming from repeated trauma of his childhood.

“Eiji,” he calls out, desperate.

Eiji brings a candle forward. Vanilla.

Instantly, a few shaky breaths in and Ash’s hyperventilating has brought him back into their kitchen. He realises where he is, glancing around at Eiji and nodding. He takes one more smell of it, before he pulls Mahogany and Teakwood back again. He’s standing. When was he standing?

“Get me to laugh,” Ash begs. “Don’t rely on the scents to pull me out I’ll never learn try and get me to laugh.”

Eiji nods carefully.

Another sniff and the scent is immediately stuck to his nostrils again, burning and burning as if he was trapped in a ring of fire. His stomach lurches again. He’s absolutely going to be sick.

“Ash—”

“— _Aslan,_ ” Ash corrects him, trying to breathe. Eiji’s gone from his vision again, and Ash has to close his eyes to keep himself from seeing anybody else.

Eiji nods. “Aslan.” He continues. “Keep breathing, Aslan. Can I take your hand?”

Aslan nods, holding his hand out. Eiji’s tender in the way he carries his fingers, holding the palm like a child within a cradle. It might as well be.

“Have I ever told you about this embarrassing story of my childhood?” Eiji asks, giggling softly at the memory. “When I was like, eleven? In math class?”

“No,” Aslan hiccups through his sobs.

“So, I was about eleven in math class, and my teacher had us split up into groups to work on problems,” Eiji speaks slow, with a smile. “At the end my teacher asked us for our answers. I don’t know why, but I don’t think I listened. So when my group partner had raised his hand, and I thought he wanted a high five. So I stood up and high-fived him.”

Aslan snorts, looking up at him with half a smirk. “You did?”

Eiji nods. “Yeah, and he just…slowly put his hand back down.”

“You’re adorable,” Aslan chuckles softly, taking another smell of the candle in hopes it would start to connect with this memory. He’s not sure if it’s working. He has faith that it is. He smells a different smell of a different candle then, one to clean the palette – cinnamon.

He doesn’t give Eiji any other instructions, he just immediately takes a deep breath into the Mahogany and Teakwood again. At this point, he dives his face into Eiji’s chest, pressing his nose into the shirt bunched up there. Associate with another person. Associate with another person. _Associate with another person._

“Eiji,” Aslan cries softly.

Eiji’s arms are careful when they wrap around the trembling boy. He debates on his next actions, but he decides that he would know what to do in case it goes wrong. He leans down and gently presses tiny butterfly kisses onto Aslan’s closed eyelids.

“I’m right here,” Eiji tells him. The scent begins to change. The scent is being reclaimed. Yet despite it all in these very moments, Ash will never be entirely over the smell of him. If nothing else, it still makes him sick. “I’m right here.”

He is always right here.

 

_I feel estranged every now and then._

 

It’s the dawn of a new day when Ash finds a letter addressed to him in the mail. Well, it’s address to him _and_ Eiji, for the matter, but Ash hasn’t had anything addressed to him ever since he first moved to Japan. Eiji says he can open it. He does.

“It’s from Ibe,” Ash comments quietly. He skims through his letter and he makes a face, but he collects himself before he relays what the note says. “He has a niece?”

Eiji nods. “Her name is Akira. She’s really sweet,” he tells her. “She’s like, six years old now, I think?”

Ash nods only once, rather slowly, through a breath. “He invited us to see her Little League game.”

You could drop a pin in the room, and the silence would echo the sound into hammers.

It’s basically an unspoken fact that Ash absolutely hates baseball. He’d be willing to go see it, but a part of his eyes are just wandering and hoping, pleading to the gods he doesn’t have to relive the age of seven. He can’t enjoy anything, it seems, without it being taken away from him. He was just a fucking kid. He just wanted to play some fucking baseball.

“Well, do you want to go?” Eiji asks him, calmly, not looking up from the potatoes he’s peeling.

He doesn’t want to. He _so_ doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to step foot on a field ever again, and he definitely doesn’t want to see the coach. Sure, things may be different in Japan, things may be safer, things may be better, but even so, that doesn’t throw away the years and years of trauma—

“I’m indifferent,” Ash says calmly.

Eiji nods. He knows Ash’s emotions about it. He knows that this is a lie, and he knows that Ash doesn’t want to admit that it’s a lie, so he just waits. “Well,” he ponders on it for a moment out loud, even though he had long since made up his mind. “I’m not that into it. If you’re okay with it, I’d rather us not go.”

Ash can only breathe in relief.

 

_Fall asleep reading science fiction – I wanna fly in your silver ship. Let my mama hang and my sister sit._

 

Ash had heard about intimate moments one would experience while living with someone. He’s heard that they were ordinary things – things like unbuttoning clothing or grocery shopping – that are ordinary on their own, but they’re intimate when you do it with somebody you love. It’s become a routine for him and Eiji, and the routine keeps them close together.

Yet some of these moments, these intimate, ordinary moments, they’re only domestically wonderful on complete accident.

One thing Ash had learned about Eiji was that his skin gets super dry during the winter, and so in the winter, to make up for this, Eiji frequently finds himself applying lotion. It’s nothing too crazy, but one evening Eiji had been caught up in a conversation before he realises there is too much lotion on his arms.

“Ah hell, I used too much,” Eiji giggles lightly.

“That’s a euphemism.”

They share a look, before it divides. One unphased and the other hiding comedic light. “Oh shut up,” Eiji shakes his head. “I mean the lotion. It practically won’t come off.”

“Phrasing,” Ash glances at the arms, noticing that only the truth was spoken. “I’ll be damned. It is.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Eiji giggles. He turns back to Ash, trying to figure out how to get it off of him. “Do you have a paper towel or something?”

“Actually,” Ash stands, walking over to him, reaching his hands out. “My arms are a bit dry, too. Maybe share?” He means this innocently. It won’t go to waste. That’s all. He didn’t think about it until their hands connect with their elbows and immediately begin to drag. It’s suddenly the most intimate thing Ash has ever seen. It’s not even supposed to be.

The boys can’t help but giggle. The lotion transferred, after all, but that doesn’t change where their thoughts were going, where their hands were moving, where their lips were tingling—

Their lips crash now. It seems that Ash is the one that pulled Eiji in, and it’s within this searing moment of hunger when Ash doesn’t mind his back pressed to the floor. He doesn’t mind that their lips have a slight tinge of lotion taste from where they caressed the skin.

He doesn’t mind it at all – being in love.

 

_It’s on now. The days are long now. The ups and the sundowns, and a twisting mind._

 

There’s the tender kisses, there’s the happy kisses, and then there’s the kisses that only arrive to cover up the comfort of heartbreak. There’s kisses during sex. There’s kisses that carry love. There’s kisses that only exist to take somebody’s breath away. No voice follows soon after.

Ash has learned a lot about someone by the way they’ve kissed him. He’s learned Dino’s clients one by one, and he’s learned to hate the feeling of kisses no matter whose lips he gave.

And then came Eiji. The exception. The perfect symbol of all that is good in everything. His kisses taste like strawberries. His lips are the perfect storm, that incredible ride of a kiss that only grows closer.

These are the only kisses for Ash that never make him scream.

He finds himself pressed against the bed, their teeth clashing with these permanently hungry kisses – they’re going to starve soon enough. But for now, they’re going to capture what they can, they’re going to drink up what there is. In the end, they’re still going to starve.

Eiji’s showering Ash’s face with kisses. He’s planting his lips across his skin like they’re flowers in a garden, but he had forgotten the pot of water.

“I love you, Ash,” Eiji whispers to him.

_“I love you.”_

Ash was used to the kisses. He was not used to this phrase. Eiji only means well, this poor boy, this war machine – he only ever wanted to love and be loved and the only language he feels he can naturally express this in is in English. Little does he know. Little does he realise.

The single push on Eiji’s chest was so strong he nearly fell off the bed, his body had to lean forward to keep hold of his weight, anchoring himself with his arms on the side. He blinks once, trying to realise what went wrong.

And Ash is gone, he’s curled up in the sheets, trying not to shake. There’s this sudden pressure on his body that can’t seem to go away. He remembers what would happen every time these words were said. Eiji wouldn’t do something like that to him, would he? Of course not. He’s so shitty for even thinking that he would. How could he think that? Eiji isn’t like that at all…is he?

He’s fucking crazy, but he doesn’t want Eiji to know this. This isn’t normal – _he_ isn’t normal, and if Eiji truly knows about what kind of a mess he is he’d probably leave. So it’s best to keep silence in his mind, rolled up under a thousand blankets as if it were a shield to keep all the evil away. But Eiji isn’t evil. He wouldn’t hurt him. He _wouldn’t._

“Ash?” Eiji calls quietly, his voice wavering like the spring wind through grass.

God damn it. It’s fucking painful to listen to. And yet all Ash can do is just not respond, just hold his eyes shut and hoping that these words of three would go away. That the language of French would just disappear. That he would shrivel up and die.

So Eiji spends the rest of the night beside him, not saying a word, curled up in a little ball in the freezing dark. He can’t sleep unless he’s warm, so he spends this night just staring up at the window, cursing the moonlight. He retraced what happened in his head so many times until he realised that it was a simple three words that sent Ash over the edge. He doesn’t blame him, really, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy with it.

He’s hurting, and Eiji always knows why Ash is hurting. It’s when Ash is hurting when Eiji bleeds the pain with him. If he could go back in time. If only he could stop anything from ever happening. Aslan Callenreese would just be a boy with a deadbeat father. What else is new?

A few hours pass of an ice cold room before Eiji feels a shift in the bed. He turns his head, noticing that his eyes connect with Ash, now, and they hold this glance for a long time. Eiji is simple. Eiji is patient. Ash has a hard time collecting these words.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers quietly. His voice is broken. Perhaps he cried. “I didn’t mean to push you. I just…”

He has to wait. Eiji is patient, even still. He knows what he means. He takes this as an invitation to scoot closer. His eyes pause for a moment, then Ash nods in relief. Despite being surrounded by a shield of pillows, Eiji only reinforces this shield. He only provides an extra barrier.

And at some point, Ash allows him inside these crumbling walls that used to fail to keep him safe. These walls don’t fail now. These walls are being rebuilt, brick by brick, and instead of pure darkness through these corners Eiji is sure to build windows.

And he sees dawn’s light.

 

_If I gotta go first, I’ll do it on my terms._

 

Eiji is strong. He’s so incredibly, unbreakably strong. But just like every superhero, there’s some kind of weakness. There’s a kryptonite. There’s a way to get inside their brain, a way to tear them apart from the inside. A way to make them crumble apart.

For Eiji, it’s the sound of crying. Specifically, Aslan’s crying.

It’s the sound of these tears that will always cause this strong façade to crack and falter. It’s just a façade, after all. He has to be strong for Ash – Eiji can’t be anything less. Yet at the same time he’s falling apart under these weights. It’s almost killing him in agony. Despite this, he still listens to the tears. He still stays by his side. He never had to promise forever, but it just has to be for now. Yet he chose forever, because he wants forever. Forever is always now.

It takes Ash approximately six months to realise just how many cracks had spread across this boy’s defence system. He knows immediately.

_This is his fault._

The mental toll Ash has on Eiji is nothing short of exhausting. Ash never deserved Eiji to begin with, and so the fact that he’s actually making things _worse_ for Eiji just shows how much he never belonged here to begin with.

He’s a burden.

Nothing sugar-coated about it. Ash Lynx is a burden to Eiji Okumura. Ash Lynx is a burden to Japan. He’s a burden to the entire world. Eiji doesn’t belong here, chained down to Ash like this. He deserves to live somewhere else full of light. He deserves to be with someone that doesn’t destroy him from the inside.

He deserves better. He’s going to receive better. One way or another.

The week while he plans this, Ash makes sure to do whatever it is Eiji wanted. On the surface, this looks like progress. It really looks like Ash was able to overcome so much when in reality he’s holding everything inside, running backwards in progress and tormenting that scared little boy from Cape Cod that resides inside.

They have play fights. They cook food together. They even go all the way. Eiji’s questioned it after that, making sure to ask if everything was genuine and genuinely okay, and Ash has learned to be better at lying. Eiji trusts him. It breaks his heart. Ash does not break down once during this week, knowing he has to keep it together. Knowing that when he leaves, it’s going to cause a moment of heartache.

But Eiji will move on. Eiji will find someone better than him. Eiji will have so many good memories to look back on now and he won’t have to think of Aslan as a boy who suffered in vain. He deserves to be relieved from this. He’s a little bird. He’s supposed to fly.

It’ll be hard at first. But things will get easier.

Ash convinces himself of this. He thinks it’s right. He has this deeply rooted gut feeling, one that will tell him Eiji will find someone better, live out the rest of his life in someplace better – that he will move on without him. And be better.

He doesn’t realise. He doesn’t know.

On the last day Ash waits until Eiji is asleep to gather a few things. He doesn’t touch the money. He doesn’t steal any food. He just takes a pair of pants and another t-shirt. He’ll survive somewhere. Ash’s heart burns. It stings. He aches in every possible way to know he won’t wake up next to the light of his life anymore.

This boy – this tiny, incredible boy – all wrapped up in blankets in pillows is the very reason Ash feels at home when he sees the stars. These stars are Eiji. These stars glisten in his heart.

But he won’t have this heart anymore. He’s leaving it on the bedside table, in a little note, telling him to find a better way. Ash has accepted the fact he’s going to wake up every morning in a pain he will never be able to replace. He’s going to forever hold a hollow spot in his heart that will continue to fill with agony.

He’s accepted this. He’s not okay with it. But for the sake of Eiji being happy, for the sake of letting his little bird fly once again…anything. He would do anything. He’d cut out his own throat if he must.

Ash watches him sleep for just a few more moments in the night, before he turns around and he leaves.

His footsteps are slow, saying goodbye to everything in this little apartment they share, thanking every memory contained within these four walls – every time he’d step foot into this place his heart sparks joy. He thanks the joy, too. He’s going to have to let it go. This is for Eiji, for his joy. It’s not about Ash.

This hurts the most. Saying goodbye. He didn’t think he’d hurt this bad in his life, considering all that he had ever been through, but here he is: standing in the last memories of his home. Saying goodbye. Proving himself wrong.

He bumps into the table as he thinks his goodbyes to all the little pictures and memories hanging along the wall. He turns, carefully sliding the chair back in, then he looks up. He takes a deep breath. There’s the door.

Ash is only a few steps away from the front door before he hears frantic shuffling from the bedroom. He makes the mistake of turning back, of suddenly panicking at the idea of someone else being here that isn’t supposed to be here – but he forgets. Eiji’s a light sleeper. A heavy enough breath could wake him up, much less small bumping in the kitchen.

Just as Ash’s eyes gaze back to the doorway, he sees Eiji frantically running up to him, a piece of paper in his hand.

_Fuck._

“Ash,” Eiji’s heart pleads with his voice, his legs barely managing to carry him over to Ash’s arms and holding on as tight as he can. He’s shaking. He’s probably already crying. “Don’t go. Don’t go, _please._ I don’t know what I did – what I said – I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m _so_ sorry. Just please, _please_ don’t leave me.”

The last thing Ash would have expected was for Eiji to blame himself. It’s the last thing he would have wanted. “Eiji,” he breathes carefully. His hands hover over his back, wanting to touch him, wanting to hold him again, but he knows he has to go. He can’t torture the boy like this any longer. Look at what he’s doing. Look at what he’s doing. “You didn’t do anything. I promise. This is my fault. I have to leave.”

Eiji holds onto him tighter, as if he would float away and disappear if he were to let go. The crying is apparent, now. Fucking Christ. Ash hates literally everything about himself, and the fact he’s done this to Eiji – he hates himself even more. The things he would do to himself.

“Aslan. Aslan _please_ ,” Eiji nearly chokes on a sob. “You haven’t done anything. Please don’t leave.”

“Just look at you,” Ash’s voice breaks. “This is what I’ve done to you. Every time I wake up screaming. Every time I ask you to stop. To hold me close. To protect me – to save me – from my own world. I’m sucking the life out of you, like I’m a goddamn _parasite_ —”

“—You’re not a parasite _,_ Aslan.” Eiji looks up at him now, astounded. “You’re _traumatised_. You’re making _progress._ I’m trying to _help_ you.”

Ash wants so desperately to say he needs help. To take Eiji up on his offer. But he knows – he knows where he’s going – he knows where he is. “I’m a liability, Eiji. I’m holding you down.”

Eiji presses his face into Ash’s chest one more time, hoping that this keeps him here, anchored to the ground. “You couldn’t be anymore wrong. You’re the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“God damn it, Eiji,” Ash mumbles in a way that makes his chest heave. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

“If you’re really concerned about how me helping you is affecting me, I can get help here. Would that help it?” Eiji is begging at this point, without ever having to say please in the sentence. He’s doing everything he can. Everything. Is everything enough? “What could I do to convince you to stay? What is it that you need? That you want? I’ll do anything, Aslan. Anything.”

“I want you to fly without me,” Ash tells him, his breathing like thunder and his voice like lightning. “My Little Bird, you were made to fly.”

_My Little Bird._

“I can’t fly without you,” Eiji tells him. He looks up again, his eyes noticeably wet in the dark. His soul shakes. “Please. I need you.” Eiji debates his next words, and he remembers to only say them in Japanese. Even if it sounds unnatural to him, he knows that Japanese only belongs to them. Nothing can hurt them here. “ _I love you_.”

“I—I lo—too—Eiji—I—” Aslan can’t seem to process his next words, when suddenly his heart and shoulders are crushed by the weight of the world. He pulls Eiji in, now, holding tightly. While he may not understand why, while he may never look at himself the way Eiji does, he knows that these words ring true. He knows that for some reason, some ungodly reason, Eiji loves him. Eiji cares about him. Eiji is willing to do anything.

“Please,” he sobs now. “Just be okay.”

Eiji nods, tears on their shoulders, and their hearts on a straight line. Aslan does not go anywhere that night.

Everything is okay.

 

_I’m tired of traitors always changing sides._

 

There’s a particular silence the next few mornings and evenings. They’re full of suspense. Heavy. They know why, too, it’s just never addressed. They both seem to know that this will just go away in time, once they know for sure another incident won’t repeat.

It’s another incident, however, that solidifies everything into place and completely diminishes any doubts or paranoia.

Ash wouldn’t claim to have a sensitivity to heat, but sometimes, he finds himself teetering on the edge of panic when heat starts to feel like he’s smothering. He can walk outside in the summer just fine, he can handle being bundled up in layers while he’s inside – it’s only a specific heat. It’s a heat that devours him whole, that takes him back to claustrophobia. In that room. With that smell. With no way out.

He’s freaking out. He’s going to panic. He can’t seem to get himself together. It’s a vicious circle – his body heats up while he panics, and this heat smothers him. It’s the same kind of heat that would push him into a panic in the first place. He’d drown himself in ice water at this rate.

Eiji’s the one that suggests he takes a cool bath to cool himself down. Not cold enough to freeze him, but enough to take away the heat. He manages the temperature, and lets Ash inside alone.

After several minutes, Eiji hears his name from the doorway. He cracks the door slightly, not looking inside, but enough for them to efficiently communicate. “What did you need, sweetheart?”

“Can—can you come in, please?”

Eiji nods once, even though he knows Ash can’t see him. He steps in, closing the door behind him, but not locking it. He turns back to Ash again, now noticing exactly why he was being called for.

Ash’s skin is bright red, raw from very vigorous scrubbing on his skin. Some spots are worse than others. Some places look like they want to draw blood. He’s shivering. He’s been in there for too long, his body trembling and pink and he’s still not quite back to himself yet.

“He’s on my back,” he says, finally. He holds out the loofa over the tub, not caring about the water plummeting onto the ceramic tiles below. “I can’t reach him. Get him off my back. Please.”

Eiji smiles softly, kneeling down beside the bathtub and taking the loofa now. He avoids touching him out of fear it would cause another reaction, even though he’s pretty sure it would be okay if he left a kiss there. Even so, he makes a reminder to kiss there once everything is okay again.

So Eiji brings the loofa up to the top of his back and works his way down, making sure to be gentle. Delicate. As if the skin would tear if he put too much pressure onto it. “It’s okay,” he reassures him as he carefully brings more water up onto his back. “Are you feeling okay?”

Ash nods, shaking, his heart and mind growing more and more at ease the more he focuses on Eiji being there. Not somebody else. That’s when he remembers Eiji. He remembers a few nights before. He remembers what he had almost done.

Eiji doesn’t notice the crying at first until he hears it – assuming the trembling had been from the cold as it had been when he walked in. So when he finishes and looks back to find tears on Ash’s cheeks, he immediately asks if something else is wrong.

Ash shakes his head. “I just—I was thinking about the other night before,” he explains. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Eiji lets out a breath in relief, then he just shakes his head. He holds his arms out, wondering if it’s okay to bring him in, and it’s only when Ash leans forward when Eiji envelops him in his arms. He kisses the top of his head, just like he wanted to.

“You were right, back there,” Eiji says to him. “I was made to fly.” He pauses, he waits, making sure to have Ash’s attention in full before he only smiles. “And you were made to fly with me.”

 

_They were friends of mine._

 

Moments are becoming less common. Less frequent. They’re all intense when it happens, but they’re happening on dates more spread out on the calendar. One particular date on this calendar, however, belongs to someone else. And that’s why it hurt.

When Eiji comes home this one evening and finds Ash sitting at the dining room table, crying into a filled cup of coffee, he immediately drops his things and rushes to the next seat in order to ask what’s wrong. Ash just shakes his head, unable to put it into words, even though it was rather easy to do so.

“Is this a panic attack?” Eiji asks him, trying to get Ash to hold up his head and open his eyes. “Make sure you’re breathing, Ash, make sure—"

Ash shakes his head. He inhales sharply, trying to calm himself. Eiji wasn’t supposed to come home to this. He wasn’t supposed to open the door to tears. He wasn’t supposed to find out that today was someone’s old birthday.

“It’s not panic,” Ash tells him. It’s loss. But he doesn’t want to admit to something like that.

Eiji’s gaze softens, then he carefully reaches over and places his hand onto the top of Ash’s. He’s tender in his voice now, making sure to provide love and comfort through whatever touch or tone Ash would ever need.

“What’s wrong, Aslan?” He asks, after a moment of time. “What’s hurt you?”

_Everything._

The thing is, Ash can’t tell him everything, because it’s not really everything. It’s just the first thing on his mind. Instead, he has to tell him enough to keep him calm, but enough to know that today, no matter what will happen, no matter who does anything, will always hurt. Everything about it. Everything about him will always hurt.

“I miss him,” Ash says, finally.

Eiji smiles softly. He almost has an idea on how to handle loss. “It’s okay—"

“I miss my brother,” Ash sobs, now, and suddenly Eiji has no idea how to approach this in any way anymore. “I miss Skip, and Shorter. I miss them all.”

He wants to help. He really does. He wants to comfort Ash in his arms and carry all the pain away. He wants to fill this empty void, one only made when death had taken this piece away. He wants to fill it or numb it and contain it – whatever he can do, he wants to do it. He wants to do anything and everything to keep Aslan Callenreese from hurting again.

But tonight, he just waits by his side. He just holds him, still. He just reassures him despite his doubts that he wasn’t the reason why they all died. He just carries him, tender, through the night, into the bed, where these tears would lull him to sleep, and melancholy would greet him again in the morning.

 

_Don’t hang around once the promise breaks, or you’ll be there when the next one’s made._

 

Eiji, at this point, has learned to spot when Ash is scared. When he’s holding back from something. Yet nothing breaks his heart more to know that Ash is starting to hold himself back from Eiji.

He’s restrained in his kisses. He’s careful with his touches. He’s holding himself and pulling backwards with a string, it feels like, and it seems that this string is wrapped tightly around his neck. Suffocating. Suffering. Punishing. He’s holding back on himself and Eiji has no idea why – until he remembers, some time ago.

It’s when they had first started trying to have sex. Ash had confessed something to him, one night, through the deepest wrecks of tears and the tiniest crackles of thunder in his voice.

“I love you,” he had admitted, out loud, finally. Granted, it was in Japanese, but it was a start. However, the tone in his voice said that the sentence wasn’t finished. It was going to continue, with the letter b. “But I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to be the same as those monsters that would touch me. They’d always lie and say an empty word to justify their actions. I’m not trying to do that to you.”

Eiji had shaken his head, trying to calm the boy down. “I know you’re not, Ash—”

“—Please,” Ash continued. “Please don’t let those monsters turn into me.”

They kiss again, in this evening, and Ash is clear in wanting to kiss him further. Ash is so desperately in love with this boy that one kiss just isn’t enough of a kiss. He wants this kiss to go. He wants this kiss to last.

But it doesn’t.

He just holds tightly onto Eiji’s shoulders, trying to restrain himself, and his head starts to lean backwards as Eiji’s lips lean forwards. Eiji knows what this means now, so he waits there, still. He does not say anything, nor does he even hint at a question. He just stays there, face leaned toward Ash and waiting.

Ash picks up on what he’s doing.

“Why do you insist on me doing these things myself?” His tone is playful, but there’s this undertone of worry. They both know Ash has to jump these hurdles on his own, but Eiji’s the one there on the other side, waiting for him. He’s also the one on the side lines, cheering for him. He’s also the one beside him, jumping with him. He’s also the one inches from him, waiting to kiss him.

Eiji smiles dearly.

There’s a moment of quiet. It’s not silence, but it’s just quiet. It’s in this quiet Ash knows what he wants to do, and Eiji can feel this little debate. He just has to take a deep breath. He just needs to lead things in the right direction.

“You’re not going to hurt me.”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Ash nods, trying to convince himself. He closes his eyes tightly, murmuring these words again. “I’m not like that.”

“You’re not.”

“I’m with you.”

“You are.”

“And I love you,” Ash is careful to use this phrase in Japanese.

“You do.”

“And I mean it.”

“You do,” Eiji says again. “And I love you too.”

Ash nods, slower this time. He opens his eyes. “And you mean it.”

Eiji grins. “I do.”

Ash takes a deep breath again. He stares at Eiji, now, releasing his grip and letting his body fall softer. There’s this two toned, two breathed chuckle that skips from Ash’s mouth. He’s ridiculous. He’s never been one of them.

Ash leans in now. He’s not holding back anymore.

 

_Kiss the feet of a charlatan. Some imagine freedom._

 

Likeliness to panic seems to be heightened in the dark. It’s unsure whether a flashlight even helps with this fear of the dark or not – in some cases, it seems to elevate the fear along with the darkness itself.

Ash seemed to have been the only detective unafraid of the dark. Perhaps he’s used to it. Perhaps, of all the fears he has, the dark only seems like a toe in cold water. He specifically requested a flashlight, and he was even given a gun. His co-workers are aware of his history, and why he took this job. They’re almost afraid of him, afraid to give pity, but if someone were to have a single conversation with Aslan Callenreese, they would know he’s just a boy. He just happens to know how to kill a man.

His partner, especially, had learned how navigate cases and walk through rooms the way Aslan would. Hoshiko means well, but he has no experience with these people apart from having worked on one side of these investigations. With Aslan by his side, however, he’s been learning so much. Fighting child sex trafficking is a field where someone can only continue to learn.

This evening, they’re investigating a house on the south side of Kyoto. They’ve been on this case for a while, now, and everything seems to finally be coming to an end with it. Their main focus is to save the child.

They’re hoping, when they walk in, that there is no child to begin with. That this is all a fluke. But the moment the door is opened into pitch blackness, Aslan can just feel it. He knows, like a punch into his gut with a knife, that there is a child in the room, and this child does not belong to the man that lives here.

Aslan moves forward, and Hoshiko stays by the entrance, monitoring the front rooms and preventing anybody from sneaking out. There’s a few times where they’ve tried. Thankfully, they’ve failed.

Ash walks into the master bedroom, and he immediately has to hold in the urge to vomit.

The child in the bed has their hands restrained, tied up onto the bedpost and loosely dangling in defeat. The blanket draped over them covers who they are in nudity, their hair long enough to be considered for either sex. The blanket rises, then falls again. Breathing. They looked no older than seven.

The toilet flushes in the next room over, and Ash quickly zips around, gun drawn, flashlight aimed directly at the doorway. When the door opens, he doesn’t seem to acknowledge the light at first, and it’s not until Ash shouts at him to freeze, when the man finally seems to understand what’s going on now.

The one time this man is not armed with a gun: when he’s only wearing a bathrobe.

He’s got no choice now, and he just raises his hands into the air. Aslan calls for Hoshiko, now. They’ve caught him.

Hoshiko is better at dealing with these assholes once they’re caught, so he leaves that as his responsibility. He doesn’t mind. He could shoot if he’d have to, but the type of guns Japanese law enforcement are given are the guns he’s not used to shooting. He’d be a bit rusty.

Aslan in the meantime, rushes over to the child on the bedside, untying their hands and carefully trying not to make contact with their skin. The child stirs once their hand drops, and when their eyes begin to open with a hum they immediately begin to panic and scurry backwards. The blanket scoots off their body. They’re a girl.

“Hey, hey,” Aslan begins, carefully, in the best Japanese he could muster. His tone is unbelievably gentle, one only provided to children that have just lost something that can never be replaced. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to touch you.”

“Please don’t hurt me,” her voice shakes.

Aslan shakes his head. “I promise. You’re safe now.”

The little girl turns her head over, seeing the man in the bathrobe now in handcuffs and being escorted out of the room. She lets out a breath, almost a sigh of relief. “Is he going to jail?”

Aslan nods. He does not move towards her. “He won’t hurt you again. Nobody is going to hurt you again.”

She watches him leave, then after a brief pause, that’s when she starts to cry. Aslan has a jacket, on his person, one that doesn’t smell like what happened in this room. He walks over slowly, keeping all his movements slow to not stir any more panic. He drapes the jacket over her shoulders, and she wraps herself up in it. Her dress is laying in the corner. She wants to burn it.

He opens his arms if she wants a hug, and she crawls into his arms carefully. She lets herself be held, and he lets her lay against him and cry. He just talks to her calmly, making sure to reassure her that everything is okay. The world hasn’t ended – she’s got a long, happy life ahead of her. The best form of revenge she can ever have is to live her life happy. It’ll take some time to walk on her own again, but it’s okay. It’s just part of the process.

“It’s okay now,” he tells her. “Everything’s okay now.”

After her crying dwindles down, he picks her up, carrying her to the front seat of his own car. One thing he and Hoshiko had agreed on – never drive the child and the monster in the same car. They may be going to the same destination, but they’ve agreed on different cars.

When he steps into the driver seat, he turns on the radio. He lets her pick.

“We’re going to take you to a hospital,” Aslan tells her sweetly. “The doctors are going to make sure you’re taken good care of and they’re going to find your family and take you home.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t have a family.”

He nods. “Then they’ll take you to a shelter with other children you can play with. And a new family will come, and you’ll have a new family to go home to, and they’ll love you so much.”

She takes a shaky breath, holding tightly onto the jacket. Will they truly love her? Or will they say they love her as another reason to hurt her? She looks out onto the night sky, watching the street lights illuminate her legs, fade away, then illuminate again. She has the same look in her eyes. She has Ash’s face.

“Okay,” she responds, quietly.

He takes a deep breath. It’s the same tone he’s held in his heart for years, carried on his shoulders, drowned in his soul. It’s a tone he’s still trying to scrub away.

He debates. Ash is careful with his next words, then he decides to pull the car over to the side. He’s had these conversations before with other children more or less her age, but these other children had been saved before anything could happen – these other children were scared. She’s the first they had failed to catch in time. She’s the first he’s going to lose sleep about. They turn to face each other.

“What’s your name?” He asks her, finally.

“Rin.”

He’s only ever heard of this name in the context of purity and wholesome characters. Hearing her say her name, now, with such a broken glance in her eyes, reminds him of the bitterness he bears when he says his own name.

“Okay, Rin,” he breathes carefully. “I’m going to tell you something. Something that’s helped me.”

She listens.

“These people, these terrible, terrible people, have done terrible things to you. They’ve stolen things from you. They’ve stolen time from you. They’ve stolen so much from your life that you’re never going to get back.” His words sound harsh and horrible, but they’re the kind of truth they both needed to hear. It’s the kind of sentence that had never been said to him out loud, but it’s something that he would have learned over time.

He continues. “But it’s over now. It’s all over now. The best thing you can do now is to move on as best as you can – to be happy. Because if you let yourself wallow around in pain, you’re letting them take more time from you. Don’t let them take that. Don’t let them hurt you any longer.”

She stares at him. “What if it doesn’t work for me?”

Ash shakes his head. “It’ll work,” he tells her sweetly. “Because, when I was your age, the same thing happened to me.”

Rin’s eyes falter. The tone in her voice shifts. Every single thing in her being turns and rotates in a way like gears trying to rewire her brain. “And are you happy?”

It’s a heartbeat. Her eyes soften in a way that brings a glimmer of hope, and Ash remembers his name. He remembers what he where he is. He remembers who he’s with.

Aslan smiles. “I am.”

When he comes home late at around one in the morning, his back presses against the front door and he stares ahead out the back doors that double as windows. Sliding down, his body weeps, and his soul wrecks and trembles while his heart slowly crumbles into sobs.

He was just a child. He was just a fucking _child_.

Then again. At one point, all of them were just a child.

 

_All the rest is predictable. Trying your hardest to melt the snow._

 

When Eiji wakes up in the middle of the night to find the bed still empty, he immediately checks his nightstand. There’s no note. He’s still nervous, his mind trying not to replay the events of that night some time before.

He checks his phone. No messages. He checks the time. 2:17 A.M..

Ash is normally home by now, in their bed – there have been some nights where an investigation has run late, where shit has happened…where things fall south. Ash normally would be in bed. He’d normally be here. He’d normally be safe.

Eiji pulls himself out of bed, worried about what could have happened. No sooner does he stand does he hear a soft, damp coughing – the kind he had heard a few times in New York. There was always blood involved.

Immediately, Eiji is sprinting out to the source of the sound, his mind screaming in the colours and blades of red, his heart leaping with fear as he runs. He turns the corner, half expecting to find the walls painted white suddenly stained with red, but instead, he finds Ash, sitting alone, at the breakfast bar, coughing into a drink. The bottle of whiskey he’s nursing right next to it looks brand new – and it’s nearly emptied.

He looks like he’s been crying. He looks like he doesn’t even notice.

He’s hurt. His heart bleeds. Even now.

“Ash?” Eiji asks.

Ash looks up, not even noticing originally that he was even there. “Hi, Ei- _ji_ ,” Ash pronounces carefully, yet his sounds are still slurring together. He’s absolutely had too much. He’s still hiccupping through his sobs. “Sorry. I’ll go to bed soon.”

Eiji shakes his head, reaching for the bottle of whiskey to pull it away and set it up somewhere high, but Ash pulls it back from him. “No, this is fun. I’m having fun.”

“Aslan, you’re crying.”

“Am I?” he smears his hands all across his cheeks. They’re beyond damp at this point. They’re still far from being dry. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry Eiji. I’m a coward.”

“No, Aslan—”

“—I am a _coward!_ ” He yells, startling Eiji in his place. Eiji is never scared of Ash, but that doesn’t mean that something would spark an immediate reaction. Ash seems to notice this reaction, and he begins to cry again. “I’m sorry, Eiji. I’m so sorry. You’re so good to me. I don’t deserve you.”

Eiji carefully sits next to him, taking the alcohol and pushing them off to the side. Out of sight. Out of mind. Before he gets the chance to even say anything, wet lips and cheeks collide with his and hands are holding him close. It’s like he’s trying to move on. It’s like he’s trying to forget.

“Fuck me,” he breathes. “Fuck me, Eiji.”

Eiji’s frozen still. Ash had never been this blunt, never in a million years would he possibly be. When asking for it Ash always tries to fall somewhere gentle, to keep his mind at ease with the polite and away from the straightforward. He takes a moment, unsure how to exactly react, his breathing shaking.

“Aslan,” Eiji says finally, grabbing onto his shoulders to pull him off. That right there was a mistake.

Aslan _screams._ “Don’t fucking touch me!” He leaps back. “Don’t touch me!”

He was scared. He was so scared.

Eiji immediately pulls his hands backwards, his eyes wide and shaking his head. “I wasn’t going to do anything to you, Aslan, I promise,” he says. “I just want you to talk to me, okay? Can you talk to me?”

Aslan holds his eyes closed for a second, then when he opens them again, he realises where he is. Who he’s with. He sighs in relief, then he nods.

“Do you know why you were drinking?” Eiji’s tone is calm. He’s not upset, he just wants to know.

Ash nods. “Work.” There’s a moment of silence, and he has to think back on it to elaborate more on it. “We found a girl. We were too late. Her name was Rin.”

 _Was she dead?_ He wanted to ask, but Ash only continued.

“We got her out of there. She’s in a shelter.” The question answered itself. “But we weren’t there in time. They got to her, Eiji. Those fucking monsters got her. Just like how they got me. She’s like me, Eiji. I didn’t want her to be.’

What once was paused had suddenly continued again, and now he’s sobbing once more onto the breakfast bar granite. He couldn’t form any other words, but what happened was clear.

Eiji carefully inches closer to him, opening up his arms and holding tightly once Aslan crawls inside. He just sobs from there, sobbing and sobbing and just _sobbing._ It always hurts to watch. It always hurts to hear. Of all the sounds in this entire world, this sound of Aslan’s tears will always hurt the worst.

Even still, he listens. He lets him cry it out. He lets him let this go. He’s willing to take all the pain that comes with this sound, if that means they’re any steps at all closer to some breach in recovery. He just holds him there, hearing him cry, his eyes closed.

They never really talked about what exactly they did to him. They didn’t need to. Eiji could only imagine how horrible it was, seeing the state he was in.

Eiji glances down, reaching to push Aslan’s hair back just a little bit so it’s not as suffocating, but he notices something else instead. He notices the way his body, wrecked with sobs, shakes in horror at the very thought. He’s trembling.

Something snaps in Eiji then, something he had never really allowed himself to feel once before. A white hot rage courses through his body, and he does not take this out on Aslan in anyway. He just pulls him closer. He just holds him tighter. Ash seems to reciprocate. The heat from this anger is pushing hot tears out of his eyes and even still Aslan’s body shakes.

That was the first time he caught himself thinking: some bastards just don’t deserve to live.

 

_Tie the knots to concentrate. Keep on pulling, that rope will break._

 

It’s about 8:15.

The coffee steaming on the counter has mellowed out to a lukewarm simmer. A soft light leaks in from the previous hour’s sunrise, and between the curtains, sits a boy, exhausted from the long hours of the night. He had only slept some after he managed to bring Ash to bed, and even then, they weren’t comfortable.

He’s sure Ash is still sleeping in there, out like a rock, unknowing to the murderous hangover that comes with his already chronic migraines.

Eiji doesn’t seem to have the appetite for anything, not even the chilling mug that’s staring at him in the face. It’s kept in the sun by the window, but this heat can only hold for so long. He’s mirroring Ash, now, staring into the glass, watching the dark coffee swirl around without any ounce of creamer. Something falls – the sound of water falling within – and Eiji immediately realises he’s been crying. He knows why, too. Because he’s not strong enough.

He’s never strong. He’s never been strong. Sure he can lift his own weight, but that doesn’t mean he’s got the capability of lifting someone else’s; yet here he is, holding up someone else besides his own.

He wants to be good enough for Ash. He knows that he holds Ash’s trust, and the fact that he has something so invaluable warms him in ways this coffee by the sun could never provide. There’s more than warmth there. Something buried deep inside.

Eiji wipes at his face and hates himself for even shedding tears in the first place. He’s not strong enough for Aslan, he has no right to be crying about it, especially considering he’s had it rather easy in life. How dare he pity himself, especially after what’s happened? Especially after who he’s with?

After some time in his life Eiji had learned to believe that he really is strong, but now? He knows he will never be strong enough. It’s that enough part. It’s always the enough that drives him mad. Strong enough. Careful enough. Good enough. He’s never enough in anything.

Yet that doesn’t stop him from trying.

That doesn’t stop him from waking up every morning and trying his hardest to make each day the best for the two of them to be living. That doesn’t dare to halt any progress, that doesn’t prevent any best attempt at anything. He may never be enough, but Aslan sees him as enough. That’s good enough for something, isn’t it?

So he’ll keep trying. He’ll keep living every day and waking up each morning to show this strong little boy all that’s good in life. He’ll help with any progress, attempting at everything with his absolute best efforts. He’ll do his best. And that’s enough.

Little does he know that this makes him strong every day.

When Ash wakes up some hours later and finds him holding onto an empty mug of coffee in the dining room, he just thanks him for the night before. His heart is nothing short of sincere, and through a migraine and vibrant eyes, he only tells him one thing more after it’s all said and done: that being there is more than enough.

Eiji doesn’t cry from it ever again.

 

_We’ll welcome the new age, covered in warrior paint. Lights from the jungle, to the sky._

 

A silent sky is perhaps the largest change between Izumo and New York. If you were to look at the sky over in New York, you’d never see stars. You’d see darkness, you’d see buildings, you’d see a world of weakness and inadequacy clashing for power. It would never be safe there, so much so that if you were to look up to the sky, you’d probably endanger your life.

The sky in Izumo is much different. There’s only clouds if you were to look up outside. There’s only stars. There’s this odd sense of nostalgia from this sky, one laced with a form of melancholy that Ash could never quite place.

It’s not until he finds himself watching the ocean with Eiji when he knows.

It’s Cape Cod. It’s almost identical to Cape Cod. Obviously, it’s different, but the feeling he gets is scarily close to being the same. You’d look up, you’d see the stars. There’s wind. There’s the sea. It could almost put you to sleep if you had your windows cracked open just right, and they were laying right out in front of it. Yet, despite all of it, it’s not Cape Cod. It could never be Cape Cod.

It’s only home.

They watch this ocean together many nights when they’re feeling particularly relaxed and tired – almost to the point of not wanting to get up to go to bed at home for the next morning. They don’t have to say anything. They almost never say anything.

It’s only home.

So they stay on these sands and they watch, holding each other as the tide rolls in, not even realising they’ll be waking up sometime in the middle of the evening, with a silent sky dusted with stars and the ocean still singing.

 

_See now, a star bursts. Looks just like a blood orange. Don’t it just make you wanna cry?_

 

Despite being taller, Ash has always tucked his head beneath Eiji’s chin while they share the bed. Eiji doesn’t mind, he just holds him close, sometimes petting his hair and kissing his forehead to his temple. Aslan remains, feeling small and taken care of – Eiji is the only person he trusts to make him feel that way.

When his heart beats, he’s safe. He listens to Eiji’s heart too, and it’s just as ease as he is. There isn’t a single fear of the outside world in these walls that they had built for themselves. There isn’t any ounce of pain here. It’s only everything and everything.

He’s not used to someone that cares. He’s not used to the feeling of someone that loves him just to love him as he is, not expecting anything else. If nothing ever happened, nothing ever happened, and it was okay. He would still be here, in Eiji’s arms, completely warm and loved and _safe._ Safety was a luxury Ash Lynx could never afford to have. But Aslan? Aslan Callenreese? He never has to be afraid of losing his safety ever again.

“Thank you,” Ash whispers quietly. “For everything.”

Eiji just kisses the top of his head, holding him closer. There’s a pause, before he pulls the comforter over their bodies for that extra protection and that extra warmth. “You don’t need to thank me.”

“I can’t do it without you.”

“I couldn’t, either,” Eiji looks at him, stroking his cheek with his thumb. “I’d go crazy.”

Ash softens his eyes. “You’re my everything, Eiji.”

Their grips tighten, and their heartbeat is all that remains of that conversation. It’s when Eiji kisses his temple to his cheek again is when Aslan closes his eyes, relishing the moment. He runs his fingers through Eiji’s hair, and just taking a deep breath, feeling this moment, hearing this heartbeat. It’s his home. It’s his everything.

Ash opens his mouth to say a specific set of three words – three words he had been so petrified to say – but he refrains. Yet again, the fear strikes through. He just seals his lips and tightens his eyes. He will say these words one day, but that day isn’t today. That moment is not right now.

Right now this moment is only a delightful mess of tangled limbs and the lingering presence of safety.

 

_Precious friend of mine?_

 

A little fun fact about Ash: he’s lactose intolerant. It wouldn’t terribly affect him, it would just make him feel sick after a glass of milk or a cup of ice cream. It depends on the product. When they’d make milkshakes, they’d use lactose free milk, when they have pizza, the cheese is fine as is.

Frozen yoghurt, for the most part, is fine. But when they found a new place that opened up on the outskirts of Oda, and they offered flavours that were dairy free, they wanted to try it out. So they make a day trip out of it, travelling about an hour in one side until they come across a cute little pink building with a quaint pink strawberry on the top, calligraphy artfully etched across a line. Berrywinkle. How sweet.

There’s tables and chairs sitting inside and outside of the building, but it’s nice outside, so they decided to sit outside. The way it worked: a customer would walk in, grab a cup and get what they want, then pay for however much it weighed. Except, on Wednesdays, they pay for the size of the cup and then can fill it however they please.

Today was Wednesday, it just so happened.

There’s dozens of different flavours on the inside, and Ash finds himself grabbing strawberry, with Eiji reaching for the mint.

“That shit is nasty as hell,” Ash laughs.

Eiji makes a face at him, then at his cup. “I’m surprised you didn’t grab vanilla, considering your plain ass taste.”

Ash just pouts, marching onward past the toppings. He decides to ignore Eiji pouring chocolate chips into his mint ice cream. What the hell is he _doing_? Ash reaches for his wallet at the register, and when Eiji arrives, he’s suddenly cut off by Eiji paying for the whole thing instead.

“I could have handled it,” Ash laughs.

“I know,” Eiji shrugs.

They decide to sit somewhere outside, with the sun just barely beginning to set and casting a faint shadow across the whole world. Everything has a faint tinge of blue, as if the colour was dripping from the sky down onto the earth below. The light has not died yet, just dwindling – but honestly? This time of night is always Aslan’s favourite. It’s simple, but it’s beautiful, and watching the dusk settle in across the sky would always take on many different colours. Tonight, there were shades of pink between the clouds.

Sailor’s delight.

“Hey, Ash,” Eiji says, with the kind of snicker and tone that he knows is going to ruin his night.

He turns, and has to watch as Eiji bites into his frozen yoghurt, teeth and all, not even flinching. He must have made a face, because Eiji almost chokes from laughter, having to pull himself together to swallow before he proceeds to cackle.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Ash stares, almost too shocked to realise he’s chuckling. “That is unnatural.”

Eiji won’t stop giggling – a beautiful sound – it’s a chorus and a melody, all with its own harmony that he composed in its entirety. Aslan can’t pretend to stay mad for long anymore after that. He just listens.

The thing about Eiji’s laughs is that they’re not just a sound, they’re an entire emotion. Just – this happiness and joy – radiating from his entire being, starting at the eyes. His whole face beams with each second of laughter and it’s the most beautiful thing Aslan has ever seen. His smile – his smile _alone_ – is enough power to bring light through every nation. So when it’s paired with laughter, that can only bring the best of times.

Aslan just watches him, ignoring his hands growing cold with a sticky taste of melting strawberry. He mouths something, then. A set of three words. He’s going to say them out loud very soon. He feels these words in his soul, now, in no way he had ever felt this phrase before.

He doesn’t remember how long it had taken before Eiji’s laughter to dwindle down, but when it does, Ash doesn’t feel as whole anymore. It’s okay, he understands this, but at the same time, he lives each day in anticipation for when he’ll get to hear this sound again. The joy it brings him – no music could ever compare.

Every time it happens again, Ash just stays still – watching, listening, doting. He’ll mouth these words again, until one day, he won’t mouth them anymore.

He says them out loud.

 

_Will I know when it’s finally done? This whole life’s a hallucination._

 

The wild lynx. Stealthy, hidden – a skilled hunter. They rely on what they hear and see around them, and it just so happens that these senses are so incredibly strong, they’re almost the perfect predator.

He has his eyes on his prey, now. A mouse, in a little apartment in Izumo – he’s doing dishes, now. Humming to himself. His back is turned.

He’s not gonna see it coming.

The lynx steps forward, pausing for a few seconds, just watching. Perhaps, in that moment, he’s in love with his prey – then he remembers, he’s not even hunting to kill. He smirks. He knows what he’s hunting for. A few more steps, he’s still silent. His arms are outstretched, licking his lips, and—

_Kya!_

Eiji shrieks, giggling with glee as Ash presses dozens of kisses onto the side of Eiji’s face and holding him close as he does. Eiji’s hands are wet, but he still uses them to cradle Ash’s face with one hand and pull him closer with the other. These kisses press everywhere across Eiji’s face, soaking in the pure joy and that powerful energy of love.

When these kisses finally slow, Eiji decides now is the time to reciprocate, until they’re caught up in each other’s arms again, relishing the feeling of their lips on their skin. Perhaps they’re tickled pink, if that’s where the saying comes from, where their faces hold tinges of red spreading across their cheeks. They kiss one more time, before they stay there, just locked up in each other’s arms.

“I love you,” Ash says finally, after a breath.

Eiji gleams. “I love you most.”

Ash does not wince at these words. He embraces them, giving them a whole new meaning that they had never carried before. No longer would he ever associate these words with monsters anymore. He would only hear them and think of Eiji, the only person that would ever deserve to carry love within a name.

Ash still holds onto him, staring at a particular spot on his collarbones. He wants to say something, it seems, something he had been thinking about for some time. Eiji’s learned to catch when Ash wants to say something, so he gives him a few more moments, waiting to see if Ash was wanting to say this to him on his own or if he was going to have to wait until it was brought up.

It seemed it needed to be brought up.

“What’s wrong?” Eiji asks him.

Ash shakes his head. “Nothing’s wrong, I’m just wondering something.”

“Okay.”

“Do you remember that girl I told you about? Rin?” His voice was small, almost like a child clarifying information with their parents before they would ask something of them. Perhaps a trip, a game, something of the sorts.

Eiji thinks for a second, trying to remember where he had heard the name Rin. “The one from the investigation a couple weeks ago?”

Ash nods.

“What about her?”

“I’ve been thinking about her,” Ash explains some more. There’s still some slight avoidance of the subject in this conversation, but Eiji doesn’t mind. He knows Ash well enough to know that Ash will get to the point of it on his own time, and he always does. He swallows. “And what she told me. She doesn’t have a family.”

Eiji waits for just a few seconds. He seems to know where this is going. Even so, he doesn’t want to jump to conclusions. He wants Aslan to spell it out for him, helping him ask for what he wants and not feel ashamed of asking for it, and he knows that it’s just around the river bend of this conversation.

There’s a long silence, now, and finally, Ash continues to speak. “I think I want to give her one.”

Eiji smiles. “Are you suggesting we adopt her?”

Ash nods again, but a bit unsure, even still. Like he almost feels wrong for even asking about it, as if it’s a sin.

“We can take some time to think about this, if that’s what you really want,” he notices that Ash’s eyes are light, while his face is almost hardened. He swallows hard. He’s scared to outright ask.

“That would be nice.”

It’s okay, Eiji is patient. He’s willing to wait for the confrontation however long it may need to be. Even so, that didn’t stop him from grinning, the suggestion finally starting to sink in with what Aslan is asking. “You want to adopt?”

Ash chuckles, repeating again. “That would be nice.” His voice is light now, his heart drumming with the anticipation.

“Okay,” Eiji thinks. He exhales through his nose. “Okay.”

“We can take her to get ice cream,” Ash thinks out loud.

“We can.”

“We can spoil her with those really cute little girl clothes.”

“We can,” Eiji smiles.

“We can love on her and give her the family she wants and the family she needs.” The more he talks on this, the more he’s in love with the idea. The more Eiji seems to agree.

“And we will,” Eiji confirms.

Ash has to pause for a moment, flustered and smiling. He remembers being a child and wanting to have kids. He remembers waiting for the day he’d get married and settled down until that life was ripped away from him. But now he has it again – and even now, he’s scared. What if he won’t make a good father?

Perhaps all fathers feel this. Eiji probably feels it too.

“Are you sure, Eiji?” Ash asks again.

Eiji nods, kissing his cheek, now. “I’ve been thinking a similar thing.”

Ash can only pause again, his face probably the deepest shade of red that isn’t from embarrassment or shame. It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay – for everybody. It’s a home full of love, full of people that only can love, and will continue to hold onto this love until the very day that love just overflows.

Within the timespan of eight weeks, Rin Callenreese-Okumura was given her own bedroom in a new home, with two fathers that love her in a way no other family could offer. Aslan remembers being just like her, thinking he was never going to make it out, thinking he was never going to survive.

Yet, here he is. Here she is. Here they are.

About a few months into her living with her new family Aslan sits with her to have a talk. He asks her if she remembers the night she was rescued. She nods. He asks her if she remembers what he had said to her. She nods again.

Then Ash finally brings things together with a series of two more questions. “Do you remember if you asked me if I was happy, in spite of what had happened?”

She nods, not knowing where he’s going. Then she remembers how he had said he was happy. Perhaps he’s not happy anymore, perhaps he’s telling her that she’s right, that it may not work—

“Are you happy, too?” He asks.

Rin blinks, then she smiles. She nods again, her voice nothing short of being completely sincere. “I’m happy.”

Aslan remembers where he was, he remembers where he came from. Then he remembers where he is now. He remembers who he’s _with,_ now.

“Good,” Aslan says, finally, staring back into the house, watching Eiji. “I’m happy, too.”

 

_You’re not alone in anything. You’re not alone in trying…to be._


End file.
